Frontiers in health policy research.

• Position: Conferences

The NBER's eighth annual conference on "Frontiers in Health Policy Research," organized by David M. Cutler, NBER and Harvard University, and Alan M. Garber, NBER and Stanford University, took place on June 24 in Washington, DC. The program was:

John Cawley and Kosali I. Simon, NBER and Cornell University, and Johan Mathis Schroeder, Cornell University, "How Did Welfare Reform Affect the Health Insurance Coverage of Women and Children?"

Frank A. Sloan, NBER and Duke University, and Jan Ostermann and Derek S. Brown, Duke University, "The Rising Cost of Medicare and Improvements in Survival and Functioning Among the U.S. Elderly, 1985-2000"

Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, NBER and Dartmouth College, "Does the Medical Malpractice Crisis Affect the Delivery of Health Care?"

Dana P. Goldman, NBER and RAND; Neeraj Sood, RAND; and

Arleen Leibowitz, University of California, Los Angeles, "The Relocation of Compensation In Response to Health Insurance Premium Increases"

Ernst R. Berndt, NBER and MIT; Tomas Philipson, NBER and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services; and Adrian H.G. Gottschalk and Matthew W. Strobeck, MIT, "Improving the Efficiency of the Clinical Drug Development Process: Results from Industry and FDA Interviews"

What were the effects of welfare reform enacted by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996? Cawley, Schroeder, and Simon are especially interested in one possible consequence of welfare reform: the loss of health insurance coverage. They use data for 1992-6 and a difference-in-differences method to look at the insurance coverage of women and children who were likely to be eligible for welfare as compared to those who were not likely to be eligible for welfare before and after the welfare reform. The authors find that AFDC waivers prior to 1996, and the implementation of TANF after 1996, raised the probability that welfare-eligible women lack health insurance coverage. Specifically they estimate that TANF implementation is associated with a 7.8 percent increase in the probability that a welfare-eligible woman was uninsured. However, welfare reform had less of an impact on the health insurance coverage of children: AFDC waivers do not appear to have increased the probability that welfare-eligible children were uninsured. TANF implementation was associated with a 2.8 percent increase in the probability that a welfare-eligible child lacked health insurance, though.

Medicare...